Posts by HORansome
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to andin,
I think it's fair to say that John Key is a bit of a conspiracy theorist about the work of Nicky Hager. So was Helen Clark.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to CJM,
What are the odds that there’ll be an SIS operative under cover with those police digging around for any Snowden or Greenwald correspondence on Hagers computers? And no, I’m not a conspiracy theorist.
That's a great example of what I call the "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but..." fallacy, where people are happy to put forward what are, to them, plausible conspiracy theories but don't want to be labeled as a conspiracy theorist. I say own the term: I'm happy to be called both a conspiracy theorist and a conspiracy theory theorist.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Well, yes. Once again, that's one kind of conspiracy theorist. The members of the Dewey Commission were called conspiracy theorists for their belief Stalin and his cronies had manufactured the verdicts of the Moscow Trials. Turns out the members of the Commission were right.
The actual issue here, surely, is the claim about whether those in power will ignore or hide evidence which reflects badly upon them, or even disseminate disinformation (a term invented by the Stalin regime to "describe" the Dewey Commission's report)? However, that's an issue which isn't unique to claims of conspiracy.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Part of the attraction of apparent conspiracy theories seems to be that they give an illusion of power to the powerless – the eureka moment of “I was right, everything I knew was wrong!”
That's true of some conspiracy theorists but I'd hesitate to define a set of beliefs which range from the plausible to the implausible with reference to just one kind of conspiracy theorist. Also, after the Snowden revelations, et al., it seems some of those conspiracy theorists might well have known something was up.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The line was being deployed preemptively, before Dirty Politics was even published. And it was quite effective. The number of people who can’t perceive a difference between Hager and Ian Wishart is quite remarkable.
In the terms of your argument, of course, Hager is a conspiracy theorist.
Indeed. As are you, what with your remonstrations of Messrs. Farrar, Williams and Graham on Twitter the other day. :)
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Ah, but that only works if you implicitly accept that the term “conspiracy theory” isn’t really a pejorative marking out irrational beliefs. Many academics, journalists and politicos tend to use “conspiracy theory” to refer to some belief which is clearly nonsense and the product of conspiracism (i.e. a conspiracy theory is something not based upon evidence nor good argument). If such a theory comes to be proven, they have to go through a whole bunch of metaphysical mechanics to show how it wasn’t really a conspiracy theory at all (consider David Aaronovitch’s “Voodoo Histories”: he starts the book by claiming conspiracy theories are nonsense and then spends the next half of the book trying to show how the conspiracy theories he accepts as being warranted aren’t really conspiracy theories).
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Most, if not all the above, were eventually exposéd by investigative journos. They're more important than ever in this public relations-dominated day & age.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Well, Mandela was an agent of terror by some definitions, but I suppose the issue is how does the common usage apply here? We tend to think of people who are like terrorists but fight for just causes as "freedom fighters", and there's some literature on how certain world powers have tried to get us to use terrorist rather than freedom fighter in order to win a PR war in the eternal war on terror.
In my work I reject the common usage of "conspiracy theorist" and "conspiracy theory" as a pejorative because working with a pejorative term influences the debate. If you define conspiracy theories generally as a species of irrational belief, then any question about whether a particular conspiracy theory is justified with respect to the evidence gets muddied with lingustic gymnastics as to why this particular theory about a conspiracy isn't really a conspiracy theory (or how what was once considered a conspiracy theory is not one anymore).
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Nick Melchior,
It might be helpful to have some examples of conspiracy theories that do make sense as a way of getting my head around what you're talking about here. All the specific examples given are fairly negative ones.
Fair enough:
The Moscow Trials
The Gulf of Tonkin incident
The Watergate Scandal
The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy
The Ford PintoAlso, arguably any explanation of the events of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory (given that if you accept the official theory you accept a theory about a conspiracy by terrorists to attack mainland America), only one of which will be warranted by the evidence.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to BenWilson,
Aye. I think it's true that when we generally disparage theories about conspiracies, it does make it easier for some people to successfully conspire. For example, most of us* thought it was ludicrous the American intelligence agencies where spying on all and sundry, which made it all the easier for said agencies to claim said theories about what they were actually doing were the ramblings of conspiracy theorists.
* Though surely none of us explicitly.